It’s somewhat of a tightrope act when you’re working with 16:9 and at embeddable, web-delivered dimensions and rez. In my experience too many cuts can prove disorientating as to where you are in the interface and disrupt context. Holding wide angle shots can drastically reduce legibility, especially at the 400 to 600 pixels across a lot of embedded video has to live within.

I appreciate that a surfeit of zooms and pans can be equally detrimental (and cause sea-sickness). Oh that Classical Hollywood conventions held up under these circumstances :)

Nice Video.
But in my WordPress-Installation (2.7) the menu to upload videos per URL looks different. I only have 2 fields: Video-URL and Title. The suggestions for Youtube and Google and so on are completly missing. If i fill in the URL i only get a normal Link – no video. Any clues?

Hi sixpack – we’ll be bringing easy embeds to WordPress.org blogs soon – at the moment this only works on WordPress.com. However – if you paste the embed code of your YouTube video (rather than the URL) directly into the HTML editor (rather than the visual editor), you’ll have embedded videos. WordPress.com users can’t do this for security reasons.

Hi Michael-Thank you so much for the hint! I have been trying to upload video via Visual Editor and couldn’t succeed but after reading your comment i did it! cant believe this. Thanks ever so much for helping me out. Now I can see my favorite video and manage to share on my site.Cheers

Does WordPress.com allow an autoplay feature of YouTube embedded videos? I can paste the embed code with autoplay of my video into MySpace and it plays perfectly. That same code will display the video on my blog post, but not autoplay it. Do I need to do something differently or does wordpress.com not enable this feature? Thanks for your help!

Ryan, if you’re experiencing this problem on a WordPress.com blog, the support team (linked) will be happy to help you out. If you’re self-hosting, you might want to consider some of the awesome video plugins available (also linked) that take embedding video to the next level

Wow…..THAT was truly TOO fast felt like I was watching an auto commercial where the announcer talks at 40 mph while the “small print ” is scrolled at 60mph past your eyes………supposed to Learn from that ? nah……….

Thanks for the feedback, Nick. We’re working with the principle that as there’s no “fast forward”, it’s easier for people to be able to pause a video on the steps they need to perform than have to sit through the actions in real-time. However, we do make a note of the feedback people leave, and if the videos prove too fast to be useful for most people, this is something that can be revised in future. Alternatively, we have step-by-step guides over at WordPress.com support

Let me add my voice to the rest who feel this video is too fast, i.e., cut too quickly. In order to make use of it I have to stop and start it as I take notes. Not very useful as is and it would be very east to do a better job, i.e., reasonably paced, that would be very useful. Think about it.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this! Alas, the shortcoming of video is that the audience isn’t able to set its own pace – it’s always too fast or too slow for someone. However, feedback is taken on board and I assure you, I do think about it in production. For a more self-paced solution to the problem, check out our screen-shot tour and text version at WordPress.com support (linked). Also – we welcome video contributions from our users if anyone would like to provide an alternate, more leisurely version.

Looks like you have a self-hosted blog? These instructions are for WordPress.com. You’re best bet with a self-hosted blog would be to copy the embed code directly from YouTube, and paste it into the HTML view of your post editor. Alternatively there are a lot of great video plugins for self-hosted blogs to make things easier. Head to Plugins > Add New and run a search for “video” or “YouTube”. You’ll be able to check out and install plugins right from there.

Hmm :) this i know, is not that hard… but what i need to do when i want to put a video from other site’s beside youtube.com and wordpress don’t “accept”… because are not uplouded in the post’s! So… only youtube work for wordpress?
You (wordpress) need to do something with this, if it is like this!

That’s because this tutorial is specifically for WordPress.com. Not all of the shortcodes available at WordPress.com are automatically available for self-hosted WordPress.org blogs. Check out the following WordPress.org support forum thread: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/221538

Youtube does allow you to do this, in two different ways. Either by adding a #t=XmXs to the URL, or by adding &start=XX (XX being in seconds) to the embed code. Would REALLY be nice to be able to do this in WordPress.

OK, one more time let’s see if I can get my example to show without the example itself embedding!!!!

this works in WordPress. You have to append the &start=xx to the video url in the short code. Unfortunately YouTube gives you code in minutes and seconds so you’ll have to do a bit of mathematics first to make it work.

Something recently changed at wordpress.org. I have a number of blogs where in the past I’ve inserted youtube videos simply by using the embed coding that I copy from YouTube. Now the wordpress editor is stripping a lot of that code out so it doesn’t work anymore. The youtube videos in the existing blogs still work if I don’t edit them. However, the embed code no longer works in new blogs or any previous blogs which have been edited. Nice to know that wordpress is such a stable product that I can depend on. NOT!

Hi, thanks for the post but I would like to know How I can insert an object video from Youtube, a personal player to show al my favorite video list… thats an object created thru Youtube wich give us the code and we can insert it in our posts… I have no clue on how to do it… thank you!

This tutorial is composed specifically for users of WordPress.com, which has some additional functionality added to handle YouTube as shown in this video. You’ll have to add a plugin to give you this type of ability in self-hosted WordPress. You can search for one at the WordPress plugins directory (or use the built-in search in your administration interface).

I have the same problem with Six-Pack [my WordPress-Installation, the menu to upload video URL looks different. I only have 2 fields: Video-URL and Title. The suggestions for Youtube and Google instructions and so on are completly missing. When I filled out in the Video URL text box, I only get a normal Link – no video.], but I’m using wordpress.com. I did also try the another way (HTML code)to embed video from youtube into my wordpress blog, but it did NOT help at all. Please show me how to solve the problem. Thanks a lot.

Hi Daisy,
for me pasting the embed code of a YouTube video (rather than the URL) directly into the HTML editor (rather than the visual editor), did the job. WordPress.com users can’t do this for security reasons.

I have an own Blog and I dont have that options, too. But using the youtube Code wont help, it’s not w3c conform…
Whatever, I also use a Plugin for that, “XHTML Video Embed”, it embeds Youtube Videos w3c conform…

Inserting the embed code should work for most videos. (Please note that this tutorial is for blogs on WordPress.com.) Otherwise, you may need to install a plugin to help your users with video embeds. Please check the Plugin Directory at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ and you should be able to find something that fits your needs.

Thank you for these easy-to-follow instructions.
Had been trying unsuccessfully to embed YouTube videos for weeks and now it’s simple and straightforward.
Btw, although it’s unimportant, when I try using the “embed code” rather than the main YouTube web address, nothing appears on my blog.

I did the exact same thing, but I don’t see the clip appear on my main page. Only the title of the post appears. I have to click on the title to go to the actual post to see the clip. How can I fix this? I want to see the clips on my main page as well.